Fantasy Draft went all right. This draft only had 8 people so teams are better than I am used to. My draft went Faulk, Garcia, Moss, George, Sharpe, Rice, Price, Jerry Porter, Curtis Martin, Tom Brady, Elam, Tenn D, Tim Brown, Ryan Longwell, Duce Staley. Overall I’m pretty happy. I may have overvalued Raiders and 49ers because I live in the area and they get a lot of media coverage. Ironically I had gone into the draft assuming that others would overvalue them because most of the people in my league are from the Bay Area as well.. Also, Yahoo has a sweet fantasy football system. Not any different from last year, but I am still impressed.

Speaking of Y!.. I have a second interview with them on Tuesday, and hopefully I’ll get an offer. I also have a couple of other potential opportunities, so I think things are definitely looking up.

Ah… Fantasy Football. It’s that time of year again when I pour over NFL notes and fantasy football news. This year we are again doing Yahoo! Fantasy Football league with their default scoring. Already a couple of injuries have changed the draft we’re doing tomorrow. Michael Vick and Chad Pennington are just a couple of fantasy players that won’t be starting the season.

I got my poker chips. They look and feel pretty good. I’ll be able to tell better after I’ve handled them for a while.

I ordered my wireless networking gear. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to set up. I’m a little concerned that setting up the wireless NIC on linux might not be that easy. We’ll see next week.

Tracy wants to buy a new digicam. She’s looking at a Canon A70. It seems to get good reviews. I’ve been looking at portable DVD players, and for $400, you can get some pretty nice ones. But on the other hand, I could get a laptop computer which can play DVD’s for not that much more.

Oh I’m having a poker party on Sunday September 7th at noon, it’ll be beginner oriented and cheap($20 no limit hold’em tournament). If you’re interested email me and I’ll put you on the evite.

I am in a quandry over how to set up my home wireless network. I can get a faster 802.11g network setup, but there’s no support for my linux machine for 802.11g cards. Either I’ll have to wait for that or I’ll have to set up my network as a slower 802.11b(10Mbps instead of 54Mbps). Of course it would save a bit of money going with the slower network as well. I think what I’m going to do is have everything except my linux box as 802.11g, and have the linux box go 802.11b, but then upgrade that to g when support becomes available. I’ll probably get another Linksys router with a combination 802.11b and 802.11g access point. Then I’ll get 3 Linksys 802.11g cards and one 802.11b card for my linux box. Although I really only need to make the computers in the living room wireless. I can keep stuff in my office with regular wired ethernet.

I ordered some poker chips from 5StarDeal.com. Nothing custom because their stamping doesn’t look very good. But the set wasn’t very expensive. Just like $160, then I got a %10 off coupon, which almost nullified the cost of shipping, but not quite.. I ordered this dice bordered set. I’ll report back on how good they are when I get them.

I’ve been playing with this UML design tool called ArgoUML and I’m pretty impressed with it so far. It looks nice and has some cool features. Give it a try if you’re looking for a UML software design package.

I had my interview with Yahoo today. I think it went pretty well. They have some very smart people, which I knew going in. I liked everyone I talked to and I think I left a good impression on them. I did get a programming puzzle that I’d never heard before. It goes like this:

How do you swap the value of two variables without the use of a temporary variable?

The answer: a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^=b;

The ^= operator is the exclusive or(XOR) function. I understand why it works, but I wasn’t able to come up with that solution on the spot. It’s clever and I would have thought that I would’ve heard this one before. It even works with structures, as long as there are no pointers to other objects.

So I have a couple of interviews lined up. Google and Yahoo. That’s a hopeful sign. We’ll see how they go. Annoyingly, Yahoo has an employment application form that is a Word Doc which you fill out. You’d think such a web oriented company could do it by the web to simplify everyone’s lives.

Also the wall removal project is complete and things look good. With all the extra space, it looks a bit empty, so I imagine some time will be spent trying to furnish it properly.

I was going to hook up our home computers via wireless 54Mbps 802.11g, but this machine runs on linux and there’s no linux support for all the new 802.11g cards, so I am either going to have to drop back down to 802.11b for 10 Mbps or wait until linux support is available.

I just finished the greatest win of my relatively short poker career. 304 entrants into an Ultimate Bet Aruba Satellite. The buyin was $100+9 but I was able to use 22000 Ultimate points instead of cash to buyin. I got better than average cards, and I played much better than average. The top 5 places each got a prize package worth $6000. The $6000 includes a $4000+100 buyin to the Ultimate Poker Classic, so that means they value the vacation package at $1900 for two. It’ll be a lot of fun. I’ll get to hang with the pros and if I’m lucky and I play well, then I’ll get on TV on the World Poker Tour. This was my 5th or 6th try this year and it finally paid off.

This was a new one. I got an email from a company saying that I was overqualifed for a job.

Also I did my bike time trial today in 23:04. Which isn’t the fastest time I’ve done, but I was running on tires that were inflated way too low and there was a pretty strong wind.

The wall removal is almost complete, and it looks pretty good. I shall be having a poker party soon to celebrate.

We’re part of the way through the removal of our dining/living room wall and the space looks better I must admit. I had my doubts, but I was wrong. Here are some pictures of the remodel. Unfortunately the “before” pictures were taken on a regular film camera because that was all that we had handy. So all I have right now are “during” pictures. I’ll put those up after we get them all developed.

I’ve decided that I could be a professional poker player. It’s not something I want, nor something I am going for. Just now that I’ve been playing for a while and I’m reasonably successful at it, it occurred to me that it’s at least better than a lot of other mediocre things until I find another job. My greatest strength at the table is that I have a solid disciplined game. I never get too upset or crazy, which is a very expensive problem for a lot of players. Because the expectation for a winning player is pretty small, one or two bad plays per hour can make the difference between a winning player and a losing player. I will probably never the player who makes the most money at the table, but my the swings in my bankroll aren’t too huge and I can come away with more money pretty consistently.